Tom Schmidt
Charlotte, North Carolina
Instagram: @thom.schmidt
Notebook Series
2019, Cast porcelain, ceramic decals, acrylic frames, and neodymium magnets
Courtesy of the artist
Paper is a material I associate with the recording of our thoughts and questions; fleeting notes and scribbles that often fill the periphery of our lives. On one hand we use paper and ink to visually chart space in the form of maps and blueprints, while at the same time we use paper to scribble out multitudes of seemingly unimportant lists. Regardless of the significance, paper captures traces of ourselves over time. By recreating notebook pages in porcelain, I hope to give a sense of permanence to these fleeting tactile experiences in a post-digital age. The imagery is loosely autobiographical, including scribbles and sketches from art school, as well as commercial floral decals from my time teaching in Jingdezhen, China. Like our own mutable sense of memory, disparate imagery might overlap, the focus can shift from crisp to blurry, and the content may range in degrees of coherence
